I'm pretty sure classes count as "studying Japanese," assuming you went to class and did the homework. Whether or not you studied on your own outside of class really just comes down to whether or not you're a good student.

IceCream wrote:

i think classes only count if you made an effort. i know i took french classes in school for 6 years, but i can't string together even a sentence. i certainly wouldn't assent to the statement that i "studied french for 6 years". If i had actually studied it, i would know a lot more than i do. Well, i realllllly hope i would!!!

Anyway, all the counting is a bit bs anyway, it really makes no difference. Sure, it's a marker, but the moment you take a few months off, it's just a bit worthless. Just get on with it...

that happened to me as well, I took it for 9 years(yes sadly, i can't say anything/read/write at all, maybe basic words but nothing else...)

Nukemarine wrote:

Let's put it another way, those that want ta12121 to count the time he spent in his college classes. I think he should, so I ask:

How many hours of study did you do in class, which is 16 hours per credit hour, plus homework/study which is 0 to whatever depending on the student?

How many self study hours did you do when starting AJATT methods? No, not watching anime or dramas. I'm talking jotting down sentences, looking up definitions or sample sentences, reviewing in Anki, etc.

That's a better guage of effort and impact of study than just having a start/stop date.

Yeah, I did a 3 credit hour class in Japanese 13 years ago. That, at MOST, was 25 hours of total study. Compare that to the 900+ hours (if not more) I put in since starting RevTK back in June 07. Yeah, yeah, yeah, my Japanese level still sucks I know it.  Something tells me that if we compared hours, then abilities of self study and college classes would fare pretty close to each other.

hmmmm

I took a night course for japanese at my college. Which was only 3 hours. The reason it was only 3 hours was because it wasn't offered during the day-time. Only during the evenings, outside the full-time courses. So that japanese course I took was only considered part-time, obviously aside from my full-time studies.


As for how much did I study in class vs self-study? I'd say self-study in the beginning it was a lot, probably 4-5 hours a day. But now since I've gotten to a good level in japanese (in terms of reading,understanding). I srs less(still do quite a lot of reps,looks-ups,etc) but it's only down to 1-2 hours. Since now I can speed up the process, this is due to getting used to japanese.

You know I asked myself this question. I do plenty of srsing+immersion. But does the immersion time/reading. Count for study-time?

I was also factoring in, what other things could I do to add into the study time. Maybe using sub2srs. But I feel that would be a lot of work just to configure/get subs/videos,etc. So I may not use that for a while now. But reading more is definitely something I will do more.

Last edited by ta12121 (2010 September 22, 11:05 pm)

harhol wrote:

Nukemarine wrote:

Something tells me that if we compared hours, then abilities of self study and college classes would fare pretty close to each other.

Surely the essence of the debate is whether or not classes are (a) necessary and (b) cost-effective, not whether or not they're as good as what we're all doing.

The point of self-study is to save money and time, not to outsmart professional education institutions. We do it because it's cheap and free from the responsibilities of others.

A head-to-head comparison is silly anyway because 1000s of hours of classes would bankrupt most people and take a decade to complete. Even the most high-end universities will only have 15-20 contact hours per week. Some users here manage double or even triple that.

More on topic, the AJATT site has really nosedived in the past twelve months or so. You'd think being a software engineer would pay the bills and then some. Apparently not.

I don't see it as outsmarting anything. You're getting the resources from different locations and different methods is all. Self study is not necessarily cheaper or more effective if you took the Rosetta Stone route. Anyway, I'm assuming we're talking about an effective Japanese college program and effective self study program.

As for head to head, I think it's fair to compare. A three credit hour course is technically 150 study hours (50 in class, 100 outside) but not likely given average student study time outside of class. A normal Japanese degree path is about ... ok, I don't know but if it's 24 credit hours of classes then that's "technically" 1200 hours of study. A guy that went self study route, kind of like what I laid out, could put in just as many hours and have 10k vocab, Level 1 grammar, 30 hours processed dramas, 2100+ kanji. I'm willing to bet that given two people that gave honest effort either with self study or college class combined with useful material, they'll be at comparable levels.

As for the site, yeah, best not to talk about it. Let's stick to the various methods laid out early on in his blog.

harhol wrote:

1000s of hours of classes would bankrupt most people and take a decade to complete. Even the most high-end universities will only have 15-20 contact hours per week.

What about language schools?

I'd say that classes would help your speaking a lot but self-study will increase your reading/understanding skills in the language. [Especially kanji]
I'm going to try to see if I can find a conversational type class for japanese near me. If I can find that. That would work wonders for me.

Last edited by ta12121 (2010 September 23, 2:51 pm)

Nukemarine wrote:

ta12121 wrote:

I'd say that classes would help your speaking a lot but self-study will increase your reading/understanding skills in the language. [Especially kanji]
I'm going to try to see if I can find a conversational type class for japanese near me. If I can find that. That would work wonders for me.

Skype for people from Japan. The language exchange site Rosetta Stone sponsors is good and also is free (name escapes me at the moment).

oh yea. I seriously got to buy a mic soon.
P.S. thanks for the info

aphasiac wrote:

Nukemarine wrote:

Skype for people from Japan. The language exchange site Rosetta Stone sponsors is good and also is free (name escapes me at the moment).

http://www.sharedtalk.com

As excellent resource!

forgot about that one,thanks!

nadiatims wrote:

A few times I tried to use sharedtalk to practice chinese. I suggested to my partners that if they type in Chinese, and I type in English, we'll both learn more. That didn't go down well. haha

Stay within one language at a time. Works better!

Hey guys, I hope it is ok to post my question here, it has something to do with the AJATT method. Khazumoto writes that it is possible to learn 50 sentences a day with his method or even more.

Link to post: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/bl … tences-how

It´s written in the second sentence, so at the very beginning. My question now is: How much time do you have to invest ervery day to keep up with the repititions if you really learned 50 days? And it was really awesome if anyone could maybe even give me rough review times for other amounts of new cards per day, let´s say 100, 20 and 10.

Thanks!

Dairwolf wrote:

question now is: How much time do you have to invest ervery day to keep up with the repititions if you really learned 50 days? And it was really awesome if anyone could maybe even give me rough review times for other amounts of new cards per day, let´s say 100, 20 and 10. Thanks!

50 sentences takes about 1hr to initially learn and review. The daily reviews would probably be in the range of 1-1.5hrs. Therefore, the total time needed would be about 2-2.5hrs. While I was doing around 50 sentences a day (using Core2k), this is about the amount of time I spent reviewing daily. However, like nest0r said, these figures aren't going to be the same for everyone, but I think it's fair to say that they fall within a general range.

EDIT: given what Nukemarine says in the next post, I realized it's important to list how I learned and reviewed sentences. Here's the information:

- I used the Core2K sentences with Cangy's sorting.
- Reading only. I didn't write anything.
- Only 1-2 new words per sentence.

Two things deserve more explanation. The first is the fact that I didn't mine sentences. I had them already "prepackaged" with Core2k. Mining obviously requires more time. The second thing worthy of further explanation is my use of Cangy's sorting. This allowed me to learn sentences much more quickly because all of the sentences are sorted by kanji, which means I studied sentences in groups that use the same kanji but with different words or readings in each sentence.

Last edited by vileru (2010 October 17, 5:06 pm)

Thank you very much for your replies! There´s two other questions I have, maybe you can help me with those too:

1. What do you think is a good length for sentences? On the original AJATT site, there are some example sentence sets, most of which are in the style "direct object(+indirect obect)+verb" or maybe "relative clause/ adjective + noun". (I hope I didn´t mess up those weird linguistical terms now...) To me, those "chunks" make a lot of sense, but do they stay as long as this the whole time, I mean for the whole learning process? Or do they become gradually longer?

2. What about the writing of kanji compounds? I just recently started to try the sentence mining method, and I have the feeling I am cheating when it comes to the readings of kanji compounds. If I fail a card once and see the reading in the answer field, I can remember it until it shows up again and then rate it with the best or second best grade. But I somehow do have the feeling that rather than paying attention to which kanji the compound is made up of, I try to conclude the reading from the sentence (because it is not long ago that i saw it), so I doubt that I will actually be able to use the compound the correct way... what can you experienced sentence miners tell me about this "problem"?